Why We Need To Take More Risks with Emily Omier

You’ve made bold moves to get where you are, including having the guts to buck the norm and go solo. But are you still taking new (calculated) risks to build the business and life you’ve imagined? Consultant to open source start-ups—and confirmed risk taker—Emily Omier believes we need to take more risks.

Emily shares her gutsy story and what it’s taught her about risk:

What happens when you hit rock bottom in your life (while running your business) and must pull yourself out of it.

The difference between something that is risky vs. something that feels risky.

Why we—women in particular—don’t take nearly enough thoughtful risks.

The road from “mercenary” (where it’s mostly about the money) to collaboration (where it’s all about relationships and outcomes).

How paying attention to these two emotions will teach you what risks are worth your time and investment.

LINKS

Emily Omier Website | Podcast | LinkedIn

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Emily helps open source startups accelerate revenue growth with killer positioning. She writes about entrepreneurship for engineers, and hosts The Business of Open Source, a podcast about building open source companies.

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RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

The Soloist Women Mastermind (Apply January 2024) A structured eight-month mastermind with an intentionally small group of hand-picked women soloists grappling with—and solving—the same kinds of challenges. 

10 Ways To Grow Revenue As A Soloist (Without Working More Hours): most of us have been conditioned to work more when we want to grow revenue—but what if we just worked differently?

The Soloist Women community: a place to connect with like-minded women (and join a channel dedicated to your revenue level).

The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:32

Emily Omier: It's not about not being afraid. It's about doing it anyway. And I think that that's a message that both men and women need to hear, but I think it's probably especially for women, that something can make you really uncomfortable, but you do it anyway. And I mean, you wanna be obviously like conscious of I'm doing this because like, I think it's gonna be good for my business, but don't let the fear of looking bad or the fear of humiliation stop you from doing things that are gonna be really good for your business that are basically, you

00:32 - 00:34

Emily Omier: know, putting yourself out there.

00:38 - 01:17

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist   Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton. And today I'm here with Emily O'Meer, who I like and respect so much. And 1, because she pretty much says exactly what she thinks and it's always interesting. And 2, because she's never shied away from adventure or made excuses, even when life dealt her a rough hand. So Emily helps open source startups accelerate revenue growth with killer positioning. She writes about entrepreneurship for engineers and hosts the Business of Open Source, a podcast about building open source

01:17 - 01:24

Rochelle Moulton: companies. And she's also a card carrying member of the soloist women community. So Emily, welcome.

01:24 - 01:27

Emily Omier: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on, Rochelle.

01:27 - 01:49

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I'm so excited about this. So we could talk about your recent move from the US to Paris, and I suspect we will. But I know that that's not even close to the riskiest move you've made. So we've got a lot to talk about. I'd like to start with what made you decide to first start your business. Do I remember rightly? Did you begin as a content writer?

01:50 - 02:21

Emily Omier: Yes. So I'm going to go ahead and start at the beginning-ish, if that works for you. Sure. So first of all, thank you for having me on the show. And I also just wanted to mention like why I'm so excited to come on the on the show. There's something in it for me too, which is that I've noticed at this point in my career that a lot of things that I did really early on that didn't used to really make sense to me are starting to make sense. Like I feel like I'm pulling together a lot

02:21 - 02:53

Emily Omier: of experiences that I've had, but I still feel like it's a little bit disjointed. And so I'm actually using this as an opportunity to figure out where all the threads are and make sense of things. So I'm gonna go ahead and start at the beginning. So I am from Oregon. I lived in Switzerland when I was in high school. When I was in college I lived in Russia for a while. Well I did like a year in Russia, but I also worked in a bar there. So it was not like your average year abroad in some

02:53 - 03:30

Emily Omier: ways, some very important ways. And then I finished college and I was like, I've got to get a job and got like an office job. And I just like, so bad, so bad. And I think a lot of people in the community have had the experience of like getting a job and then being like, what the hell was I thinking? Like, this is, this is not me. But I got the hell out of there. I moved to Spain with my boyfriend at the time, later became my husband. And you could say like, that was the first

03:30 - 03:48

Emily Omier: time that I had a business, I was like I was teaching English, but it was freelance. So like I had to go, I had to hustle for clients and stuff like that. And then I also had an idea to build a company doing audio podcast tours. This never took off.

03:48 - 03:51

Rochelle Moulton: You didn't know that about your story. Okay.

03:51 - 03:54

Emily Omier: I know. I know there's a lot of things you don't know about me, Rachelle.

03:55 - 03:56

Rochelle Moulton: Well, good. Let's hear

03:56 - 04:32

Emily Omier: it all. So I had this idea and at the time iPods were kind of new and I was like I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna do this and so somebody asked me or no so I asked somebody like how do I build a website like I don't I don't know any of that and they recommended that I use this software called Drupal. Drupal incidentally is an open source software. So is WordPress, which is their main competitor, at least at the time. And anyway, WordPress would have been the better option. Drupal is really, really fucking complicated. And

04:32 - 05:09

Emily Omier: this was terrible advice, but I like figured out how to do it and I built this website on Drupal. I never made a business out of my iPod tour guides, but I did record, like I did record actually a bunch of, they existed. It's just that I was really good at marketing myself as a service provider and not good at marketing a product. I wouldn't even say that I was not good at marketing a product. I lacked the self-confidence to even tell people that this existed. That's a problem. Yeah. In fact, when I think back now,

05:10 - 05:47

Emily Omier: as somebody who later went on to professionally do marketing communications, I think that part of some companies, even real companies, not like my fake company, are like, it's a lack of confidence issue that can be behind some marketing issues, almost like people not being really confident that like, hey, this thing I created is like so cool that you should check it out and buy it. So anyway, then after a couple of years, I moved to New York City. I was a tour guide. So I had the tour, the podcast tour ideas. I was like, how am

05:47 - 06:19

Emily Omier: I gonna figure out how that works? Well, I'm gonna be a tour guide when I move to New York. So I did that. I did tours in, I did tours in English. I also did tours in German and Spanish. And I really liked it. It also was really good for learning how to be comfortable speaking with public speaking because every day you were speaking in front of a group and it was always different. There was always something that you couldn't control about what was going on. So I did that. Then I went to graduate school. I

06:19 - 06:39

Emily Omier: went to graduate school at Columbia University and then here in Paris at Sciences Po. And then tried to be a freelance journalist for 3 years. I went to journalism school and that like being a journalist that was financially an absolute complete failure. Yeah, period.

06:40 - 06:43

Rochelle Moulton: Well, usually nobody goes into journalism for the money.

06:43 - 07:21

Emily Omier: Yeah, well, you don't go into journalism for the money, but like you do hope to like be living somewhere like slightly above the poverty line and that didn't work out for me. So anyway at a certain point, well not just at a certain point, so then I got married then a couple years later I got pregnant and my husband when I was pregnant was diagnosed with cancer and he fucking died. So that sucked. And that was, It was actually not just his death that made me like, wow, I better like stop fucking around and like make

07:21 - 07:41

Emily Omier: some money. That made me decide that I really need to get serious about like a business that actually pays. And guess what? Journalism is not a business that pays. I didn't start my business immediately, incidentally. So my mom also died a year after my husband. So like an infant, my mom was sick. I was taking care of her.

07:41 - 07:44

Rochelle Moulton: So your husband passed away after your daughter was born?

07:45 - 08:21

Emily Omier: Yeah, 2 months after she was born, but he was very ill. So he was diagnosed with cancer when I was 5 months pregnant. And then he was like from moment of diagnosis to his death, very, very ill, like increasingly ill, but like even at the beginning, we're talking like multiple hospitalizations, like doctor's appointments almost every day. I mean, it was really a nightmare. And I do wanna like put this out there because a lot of people have asked me, they're like, Emily, how did you keep your business going? Well, all these other things were going on.

08:21 - 08:57

Emily Omier: And I'm like, I didn't. Like, I mean, you don't like there, there is a point at which you just can't realistically keep a business going because it's so in the situation I'm thinking about literally like there would be an urgent doctor's appointment like every other day you can't have a meeting with a client like scheduled because you would just be canceling it all the time and you have all these other you know managing somebody's illness is it's like a job in and of itself, like you're making appointments. Anyway, long story short, if you're like going through

08:57 - 09:07

Emily Omier: a really rough time like that, do not think, oh, everyone else out there is like managing this and keeping their business afloat, because they're not. They're not. Exactly.

09:07 - 09:12

Rochelle Moulton: And so where were you in the world when all this happened? Were you back in the States, or were you overseas?

09:13 - 09:14

Emily Omier: Yeah, I was in Portland.

09:15 - 09:18

Rochelle Moulton: OK. And then your mother passed away. So here you are

09:18 - 09:58

Emily Omier: with really lots of major, somewhat terrifying life changes. So what did you do? Well, my husband was from Nicaragua, and I moved to Nicaragua. Which is sort of funny to talk about afterwards, but at the time I was like, well, in spite of being very cynical about journalism, I had a book project that I wanted to work on that required doing research in Nicaragua. It's a book that is still worth, it should be written. I'm not sure if the archives that I was researching at still exist. I hope so. But so my mom died and I

09:58 - 10:05

Emily Omier: was like, I'm moving to Nicaragua. Yeah, my daughter was 20 months old when we moved there.

10:06 - 10:06

Rochelle Moulton: Gutsy.

10:07 - 10:33

Emily Omier: You know, it's interesting because I didn't really even think, I didn't think like that. I think it also just goes to show you how sometimes the, you know, people are different, the things that seem like risky or gutsy to you. At the time, I was just like, I want to write this book. I want to make sure my daughter gets Nicaraguan citizenship. Not that like a Nicaraguan passport is like the golden ticket, but I thought it was really good to have a connection to her dad.

10:33 - 10:35

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it's her father.

10:35 - 10:53

Emily Omier: And you know, and I wanted to write this book and plus like stuff is cheap in Nicaragua and like you can like child care doesn't cost an arm and a leg. So I was like, that's also not a bad thing. So yeah, and you know, I'd been there before, like I kind of didn't know 100% what I was getting into, but it wasn't a total unknown either.

10:54 - 11:01

Rochelle Moulton: And so what happened while you were there? Yeah. I know the answer, but I want

11:01 - 11:01

Emily Omier: to hear

11:02 - 11:04

Rochelle Moulton: it. Our listeners want to hear this.

11:04 - 11:43

Emily Omier: So Nicaragua being not a very large country doesn't always get tons of news coverage. But in 2018, there was pretty massive civil unrest that for a while, at least from on the ground, it looked like it was going to civil war. It didn't. The government sort of effectively, though fairly violently, suppressed the civil unrest that was going on. But yeah, so I left. There was a period of about a week where everybody that I knew like all the expats all the Nicaraguans with like the means to do so they like fled the country. Some people ended

11:43 - 12:01

Emily Omier: up going back but far from everybody. So yeah then here we are We're a little over 2 years after my husband had died and my mom, my mom's died and and I've just like fled Nicaragua. I will mention like if you ever have to buy a ticket at the airport this is a bad situation.

12:03 - 12:09

Rochelle Moulton: I just have this picture in my head of you and your daughter like fleeing for your lives, trying to get

12:09 - 12:44

Emily Omier: the last plane out. I mean, it wasn't quite that like dramatic, but yeah, there was like no moment when I really feared for my life. But it was just that you, you know, when you're in a situation like that, that's fluid, you wanna sort of mentally make a line, like at what point does this become untenable for us to stay? And what happened is like the line was crossed. We actually had plane tickets to come back to the US just for the summer and they were for like a week later. And I was like, no, we're

12:44 - 13:19

Emily Omier: not waiting a week. We're going to the airport and leaving now. So on the 1 hand, I think it was probably less dramatic than it sounds. On the other hand, I think in terms of how it affected me emotionally, not because of the drama of leaving the country in a rush, but rather that I had to abandon this, first of all I had to abandon this professional project that had been fairly important to me and I had to sort of abandon what I thought of as was my plan for the next several years at least. And

13:19 - 13:53

Emily Omier: at the same time, like nobody could relate unless they had been there. Whereas at least when you have a conversation with someone and you're like, my husband died, they're like, oh, I have a mental image of what that would be like. Or my mom died. Okay, I can like I have, I have in my head and understanding of what that means. But like, I just had to abandon this project that was really important to me and leave this country. It wasn't my country, but like I was invested in staying there for a while and I had

13:53 - 14:26

Emily Omier: a pretty real connection because of my husband. And now I'm like sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my dad's spare bedroom with my 2 year old daughter and like thinking what the fuck's next. That's not a thing that people could relate to. And that was really the moment I was like, I don't know where I'm gonna go next. And at that point I had my business, my business had already been started for, I'd been working on it for a good year and a half. I started it before moving to Nicaragua. So I knew where

14:26 - 14:45

Emily Omier: I was going with my business, but I had no fucking idea what I was doing with my life. It was like the third straw or the third shoe drops and it was, yeah, it's pretty intense. So I tried to answer your question as fully as possible 20 minutes later.

14:45 - 15:23

Rochelle Moulton: I mean, no, but this is why I wanted you to come on the show, because this odyssey is so unusual. And yet there are so many pieces of this that are relatable. I mean, most of us have been metaphorically on the mattress wondering what's next. Not your specific set of circumstances, but I mean, the question becomes, what do you do when you're at your lowest point? Like, how do you get yourself back up and do the next thing? Right? So, So your next thing was the shall I call it a writing business content, strategy content, writing.

15:23 - 16:06

Emily Omier: Yeah, so at the time, and that wasn't new, when I sort of restarted my professional life after my husband's death, actually after my husband's death, as my mom was declining, I had really thought through how do I take the skills that I already have, apply them to something that I think is reasonably interesting that I'm not gonna hate doing, but also where they're...